The good terrorists are the guys who bomb and kill Indians. The bad terrorists are the ones who attack Pakistani interests, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In other words, you blow up the Taj Mahal Hotel, you are a good guy. You blow up the Marriott in Islamabad, you are a bad guy.

No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America - both because that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and because our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources.

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?

This is the one international institution we have in which governments get together to work collectively for a common purpose. International crises, by definition, require international solutions. Peacekeeping is a response to conflict, is a response to situations in which often it is not the business of any one particular country to get into. It seems to me, therefore, that the world will for the foreseeable future need peacekeeping.